— by Odysseus
In So Long and Thanks For All the Fish, Douglas Adams described a minor character as living “outside the asylum”. Adams’ character had built his house to appear inside out so the interior brick finish, lighting, furniture, awnings, hose spigots, and other accouterments made it appear as though one were “outside”. He named his house “Outside the Asylum” so that, by being indoors, he could be outside of the asylum that was the rest of the world. Adams’ character was making reference to the fact that most of the rest of humanity seemed insane to him.
In light of the current predicament of western societies, this same position could be taken, but with a much darker tone. Our western governments are starting to view and to treat their entire populations as if we are either inmates of an asylum for the criminally insane or, at best, gravely mentally ill, not responsible for our own actions, and not competent to mind our own affairs. Even worse, our governments are setting out to ensure that this perception becomes reality, where it is not there already.
While the “gun control” debate continues to rage in the United States, few people appear to comment on the ubiquitous nature of firearms in America throughout the last 230 years. No doubt, they refrain from commenting because guns were almost as equally ubiquitous in Europe in 1913. However, this post is not a discussion about “guns” per se, but, rather, a more general discussion about the level of responsibility assumed for adults in the Western societies. Guns are merely a symptom of a larger movement. As England and Europe have strictly limited firearm possession to the point of a near-complete ban, more recently, they have restricted the right of citizens to carry a pocket knife or other sharp instrument. This restriction is despite the fact that one of the first distinguishing feature that separated Homo Sapien sapiens from other primates was our use of and carrying of tools, primarily the knife.
The “modern” man is being turned by his government into a remarkably helpless creature. Fifty years ago, most people smoked, wore hats, and carried pocket knives of some kind on their person. Men wore durable work clothes or a wool suit, and many wore a vest as well as a coat, giving the man layers of clothing that retained insulation qualities even when wet. Nearly everyone always carried a knife as a basic tool, some means of starting a fire, be it a lighter or matches, and protection from the sun/weather for one’s head and eyes. Any person suddenly snatched off the street and dropped in the wilderness would have had a far greater chance of survival with these three basic tools than the modern urban dweller of today. Fifty years before that, nearly everyone carried a firearm and/or a sword in addition to the above basic tools.
Nowadays, fewer and fewer people carry any kind of fire-starting tool. Our clothing is less durable or versatile than in the past. We pass through numerous checkpoints which require the surrendering of even the smallest of pocket knives or even nail clippers and scissors, and some places are even requiring that we remove our belts. Due to the inconvenience caused by these “search/surrender” points, increasingly larger numbers of people are opting to simply not carry these traditional tools or wear belts. We are becoming ever more helpless sheep.
Perhaps even more fundamentally, humans of previous generations had a mentality of self competence. Not “self-confidence”, the aspiration of every mollycoddling primary school teacher, but “self competence”. People were not only more capable in a wider variety of situations, but were both willing and able to take responsibility for solving their own problems.
Their willingness and ability was not limited to only technical problems, such as changing a tire or doing minor repairs on both clothing and automobiles, but also tackling personal problems as well. People knew how to fist-fight if violently confronted which was expected and accepted. This was true as recently as 35 years ago. If there was a natural disaster, the majority of people knew how to take the necessary basic actions to both survive and sustain society without requiring governmental or “official” assistance. In contrast, if there were a fire nowadays in a downtown area, how many contemporary people would attempt to form a “bucket brigade”? Many people today do not even know how to clean and cook an animal.
The success of the 9/11 hijackers rested not in the complexity of their plans or the sophistication of their weapons. They managed to hijack four plane loads of people, with nothing but box cutters, which are extremely short bladed knives. They only succeeded because the passengers had been conditioned over the course of their lives to be passive. They had always been told to “do nothing” and wait for the authorities. They did not realize their own capacity to use violence in their own defense, and, as a result, were made “defenseless” only by their own government indoctrination. They were incapacitated by a learned helplessness.
According to most reports, only the passengers of Flight 98 eventually gathered themselves to do what would be obvious to Americans of previous generations and to overpower the numerically inferior, poorly armed terrorists. Even then, it took some independent thinking, discussion, and assembly of a group before the acculturated programming of helplessness could be overcome.
A previous generation of men, composed of a majority who had come back from World War II, Korea or Vietnam, would not have waited nor allowed the hijackings to progress as they did. These earlier generations who had tamed the west or explored the planet, and were well-versed in hunting, fishing, camping, fighting, and shooting, also would not have been intimidated by a few lunatics with small knives. Only a select few of the most pampered, effete elites have ever been as pathetically helpless as today’s western citizens.
Rather than seek to restore some independent capabilities to the citizens, enable citizens to be more capable of handling themselves under adverse circumstances, our leaders are going in the opposite direction. They seek to take away every sharp instrument, every instinct for taking action in self preservation. Their actions are all directed to making us ever more dependent on “authorities” in any crises, large or small. They try to engender fear of “being on your own” rather than recognizing it as the most basic nature of existence in the universe.
This change in self-sufficient mindset has now invaded our economic lives. Rather than societies composed of people who look after themselves and seek out the means to provide for themselves so that they can then better their own standard of living through new ideas or greater effort, we find our societies to be composed of people who expect to be “looked after”. Improving one’s position is thought to lie only through luck or patronage. Standing on a street corner or in an elevator or aboard mass transit, one really does not overhear discussions among containing the self-directed words “when my business takes off”, “when I go out on my own”, “when my ship comes in” or even “if I get the promotion”. Rather, one only hears wry remarks about “if I win the lottery”.
Humanity’s normal individualistic ambition to achieve has been subverted into the most speculative, least likely long-shot propositions. The people now fantasize about a singing career arising from a win on “American Idol.” They fantasize about becoming a sports star or a movie star or somehow getting on a “reality TV” show. As result, they are neglecting investment of the necessary efforts to have a realistic chance of achieving realistic, achievable goals that will serve as the foundations for productive, successful lives. People nowadays refuse to learn carpentry so that they can devote more of their time to practice singing or engage in in self promotion online. They have not merely quit their “day jobs”; they do not even realize that they need to have such “day jobs”.
What we at The Cassandra Times are suggesting is that these phenomena are not isolated, separate events or developments, but, rather, are connected symptoms of a fundamental transformation of society that has been sweeping the western world. The citizens of western societies are being infantilized into utter helplessness, both physically and psychologically. The causes of these transformative phenomena are multifarious, but not accidental. There seems to be a drive by the governments and the elites of the west to achieve precisely this result. While bumper stickers stating “Politicians prefer unarmed peasants” have been available commercially for some time now, the problem runs much deeper than that. It appears as though the politicians and the elites not only prefer unarmed peasants, but ignorant, foolish, incompetent, unthinking ones as well. The ruling class wants peasants who cannot handle their own finances, medical decisions, self-defense, business or even their own sustenance. Traditionally, this was the underlying reason for slave owners to forbid slaves from having weapons or learning how to read. Learned helplessness is a good attribute in a slave. Similarly, if the prisoners are sufficiently helpless and docile, even prisons don not need walls.
While other commentators have noted the insult that our leaders give to us when they insist on treating the citizenry like children or like the mentally incompetent, we here at The Cassandra Times discern an even darker view. Parents try to raise their children to, someday, be capable of competence, to be able to handle themselves in the world without assistance. Guardians and psychologists try to equip the mentally incompetent with coping skills, hoping that they can someday rejoin society and take responsibility for themselves for living on their own. What the elites are doing to our western societies are nothing of the sort. Instead, it seems more like the blunting of horns, the removal of tusks, and the gelding and general domestication of livestock. In the end, these animal husbandry practices do not work out well for the livestock.
